LET’S say President Bush wanted to convince visitors that there was no dog poop on the White House lawn, even though he knows Spot and Barney were just out there.

What he wouldn’t do is tell his guests to go roll around on the grass for a little while and see what they find.

As necessary as Wall Street reform might be, it is not likely to restore investor confidence in a stock market that has lost trillions of dollars of value through corrupt practices.

In fact, the closer the government looks for wrongdoing, the more likely it is to find some. And each new scandal will cause investors to become even more skeptical of corporate America and Wall Street.

How much more wrongdoing is out there? Probably a lot, but nobody really knows.

It’s sort of like rats in the subways. If you keep your eyes away from the tracks, you’d think there weren’t any.

And that makes subway riders feel a lot better.

Securities fraud is a lot like that – if you look too hard for the rats, you’ll unnerve people riding the train to wealth.

Put American business under a strong-enough microscope and you’ll find some nasty stuff.

Keep in mind that Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing, WorldCom and others are still – some more than others – ongoing businesses.

The government could search endlessly for all the fraud involved in dot-com businesses that no longer exist but whose executives and co-conspirators are sitting pretty atop their ill-gotten gains.

There are probably still thousands of accounting finagles to be uncovered – involving stock-option accounting and corporate profits that were fiddled to satisfy Wall Street, and initial-public-offering abuses that deprived regular folks of so much dough that the true figure will never be determined.

I’m not suggesting that Washington shouldn’t root out the offenders and send them to jail after a flogging. And it doesn’t mean Wall Street shouldn’t be forced to clean itself up.

But before we continue this purge, understand what we are getting into and what we can expect.

Right now, there is an entire generation of investors who will probably swear off the stock market for a long while.

The time to stop yesterday’s corruption was when it was happening. Washington didn’t want to see the rats because they helped make a great economy and wonderful climate in which to be re-elected.

Here’s a suggestion from someone who doesn’t roll around on lawns anymore.

Washington should kick a few more corporate butts just to show it can and then focus its energy entirely on stopping future abuses.

Once the scandals are out of sight, investors and corporations might be able to get their minds back on making money.